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November 29, 2012

Blog Tips: Stay Modest

I am interested in blogging, and I read quite a bit from highly successful bloggers who write about it. I try to incorporate what I can here, even though I find that much of it is beyond what I can accomplish with my limited time, expertise, and budget. I also try to share the strategies that seem to work with my readers in these blog tips posts. Again, I do this because I prefer collaboration to competition, and I think that our community becomes stronger when we work together.

This post is a bit different from the usual blog tips because I'm not so sure about this particular recommendation: a blogger should avoid arrogance. While it is one that I have tried to follow here, I cannot help noticing that some of the most popular atheist bloggers seem to do the opposite.

Different bloggers handle popularity differently. The clever ones remain modest. They continue to write in the same fashion. They continue to work hard. Some bloggers however, they become arrogant.

They begin to write in a somewhat preaching fashion. A certain level of infallibility tends to creep into their posts too. If you want to lose your readers fast, losing your modesty is probably one of the easiest ways of doing so.

What Shaw is talking about here is the sort of blogger who starts out being appropriately modest, gains popularity, and becomes arrogant. The idea is that this sort of thing would be a turnoff to readers. But is arrogance really a turnoff to readers? Is it true that losing one's modesty will lead one to lose one's readers?

I would like to think that it is. What Shaw says certainly makes sense. I have always been turned off by arrogance, and there are certainly atheist blogs I used to enjoy that I no longer read because of this very thing. And yet, these same blogs remain extremely popular.

What do you think? Is a blogger's arrogance a liability, or is it an advantage?